Space Ritual: Collector's Edition

Crucial reissue from a band whose disorienting electronic drones and motorik rhythms were akin to their Krautrock contemporaries, but who also could make a racket as unrelentingly punchy and violent as anything from the Stooges' Fun House.

It's been said that the span between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars was science fiction's downer period, with the grim silliness of TV shows like Space: 1999 and dystopian unhappy-ending movies like Soylent Green and The Omega Man dampening the optimism of NASA's space exploration with constant warnings of a gloomy future and post-apocalyptic isolation. But it was a golden age for sci-fi in pop music: Between the unbridled creativity of Sun Ra's Philadelphia years, the development of Parliament's intergalactic mythos, and David Bowie being David Bowie, there were plenty of artists who saw something promising outside the bounds of Earth.

And aside from Sun Ra, few artists captured that sense of mind-warping, my-God-it's-full-of-stars astronomical mysticism in their music like Hawkwind. With their tendency towards extended jams full of disorienting electronic drones and drummer Simon King's motorik rhythms, they had a certain creative kinship with their Krautrock contemporaries. But their racket could also be as unrelentingly punchy and violent as anything from the Stooges' Fun House, especially considering guitarist Dave Brock's Ron Asheton-esque affinity for blistering, wah-wah-drenched riffs and Nik Turner's freeform sax outbursts, which were more Steve MacKay than John Gilmore. It was all put to good use by their lyrics and their philosophy, much of which was inspired by the writing of sci-fi author and sometime collaborator Michael Moorcock, and typically themed around interstellar travel, metaphysics and Pythagoras' theory of celestial-mathematical "music of the spheres."

If this all seems a bit dense and weird and impenetrable, rest assured that Hawkwind's arcanum isn't too difficult to get caught up in, especially via their circa-1972 lineup-- which delivered plenty of straightforward rock riffage amidst all the special effects and featured, amongst the aforementioned personnel, a former rhythm guitarist turned bassist named Lemmy Kilmister. Space Ritual, recorded over two separate concert dates in London and Liverpool in December 1972, is a solid effort at capturing what made Hawkwind a cult favorite, and the Collector's Edition pads it out just enough to keep things from being too overwhelming. The set has been expanded from its original "88 minutes of brain damage" (as a 1973 print ad hilariously put it) to just over two hours, with most of the added material devoted to a few alternate takes and the restoration of a few minutes here and there that had to be cut for the original United Artists double LP. (A bonus DVD includes the whole shebang in Dolby, and despite it being in PAL format, North American viewers should be able to hear it on their PCs or DVD players.) The flow of the concert typically alternates between spoken-word passages about time, space and the future, delivered with ominous camp by resident poet Robert Calvert, and extended, high-velocity performances of material from their '72 album Doremi Fasol Latido, with a handful of non-album tracks thrown in for good measure. Everything you need to glean from this album can be heard in the first 20 minutes: The Electric Ladyland-esque hue and cry of the distortion-heavy opening cut "Earth Calling", the 10-minute "T.V. Eye"-gone-starfighting assault of "Born to Go", the rumbling vortex of bass in "Down Through the Night" and the Calvert space-voyage poem "The Awakening" ("Landing itself was nothing/We touched upon a shelf of rock/selected by the automind/And left a galaxy of dreams behind...").

But stopping after there would be a waste, and while it takes a certain dedication to see this album through in its entirety-- if no drugs are immediately available, Space Ritual also works as background music while you read Jack Kirby comics-- its singleminded, ceaseless momentum is too powerful to become tedious. Lemmy and King provide a lot of that force: Kilmister was a recent convert to bass about a year previous to the album's recording, and his tendency to play it like a blunt instrument suits the material well, especially when he sets about on one of his trademark idling-dragster solos. (His sparring with Turner's sax on "Lord of Light" is especially impressive, and serves as an early sign of things to come with Motörhead a few years down the line.) King has one real nifty trick on the drums-- a machine-gun roll that he hammers out at least a dozen times in every song-- and even though it starts to stick out as a bit of a crutch, the fact that it sounds exhilarating every single time attests to his sense of knowing just where to drop that crescendo, and it helps the nearly ten minutes of "Brainstorm" fly by quickly. Brock's guitar, meanwhile, holds the odd position of transforming over the course of a song into a sort of ambient noise, since its riffs are typically doubled up and sometimes overwhelmed by Lemmy's bass; the moments where it sounds like his wah-wah's congealing into Dik Mik's whirring, searing electronic effects are some of the most captivatingly strange sounds on the record.

There's a couple detours from their full-speed-ahead acid-punk-- the catchy Wilhelm Reich tribute/Canned Heat knockoff "Orgone Accumulator", the cro-mag vertigo doom-blues of "Upside Down", the slow, zero-G boil of "Space Is Deep"-- but none of it seems like digression for its own sake. Even Calvert's poems, which skew a little portentous sometimes ("Welcome to the oceans in a labeled can/ Welcome to the dehydrated lands/ Welcome to the south police parade/ Welcome to the neo-golden age"), add a bit of linguistic substance to an album more memorable for its riffs than its simple, usually flatly-sung lyrics. Space Ritual isn't a prog-rock showcase-- most of its best moments come from intensity rather than chops-- but it's one of rock's greatest attempts to connect with the rest of the universe. Steppenwolf sang about how it would feel to "fire all of your guns at once and explode into space"; this album actually gives a good idea of what that would truly sound like.